Hi folks!
So at last week's Fedora 30 Beta Go/No-Go meeting, it was decided that
the Basic release criterion:
"Boot menu contents
The boot menu for all supported installer and live images should
include an entry which causes both installation and the installed
system to use a generic, highly compatible video driver (such as
'vesa'). This mechanism should work correctly, launching the installer
or desktop and attempting to use the generic driver."
should no longer apply to Beta - i.e. that it should no longer be a
Basic or Beta criterion.
The justification for this is, I hope I am correctly representing all
views here (please say so if not), that this mechanism is both less
necessary (due to a general reduction in the amount of 'weird' graphics
hardware out there, and general improvement in the reliability and
coverage of the major drivers for the major graphics hardware
manufacturers) and inherently less likely to work (due to the general
trend of work on kernel modesetting and Wayland) than it used to be.
For context, it is worth noting that the *feature* predates the
introduction of both kernel modesetting *and* Wayland to Fedora. What
the feature initially did was tell anaconda to write an X config file
specifying the 'vesa' driver (instead of working out the correct
'native' driver for the adapter and writing a config file specifying
that). After KMS was introduced in Fedora 10, the mechanism was tweaked
to also pass the 'nomodeset' kernel parameter to disable KMS. Around
2012 (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=858270) we noticed
that the X config file mechanism was a bit superfluous as 'nomodeset'
alone could basically be relied on to force some sort of 'fallback
mechanism', and so the feature was simplified to *only* specify the
'nomodeset' kernel parameter (this is all it does now).
The *criterion* dates to 2010, in the Fedora 15 release cycle: it
appears in the Fedora 15 Alpha criteria but not the Fedora 14 Alpha
criteria. It was added on 2010-08-16:
https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=Fedora_15_Alpha_Release_Crite...
The group at the meeting did not, however, make any further decisions,
so this leaves us with some open questions:
0) Do we generally agree with the decision made at the meeting? If
anyone (especially a subject matter expert) strongly believes the
decision was wrong and this should still be a Basic/Beta requirement,
please say so.
1) Should the criterion be modified somehow, but some requirement in
relation to some kind of fallback graphical mode be kept at Basic or
Beta?
2) Should the criterion be moved to Final, unchanged or changed
somehow?
3) Should the requirement just basically be dropped entirely as no
longer useful?
4) (This one mainly for ajax and airlied) to what extent does the
concept of a 'fallback option' for our supported desktop environments
and graphical servers still actually make sense? Could a different
implementation of the same basic idea be envisaged, and would it be
useful? If so, should we do that, and what would be the consequences
for the criteria?
I realize this is quite a big and fuzzy topic, but I'm hoping the
responses to this mail will clarify our path :) So if you have any kind
of useful information or strong opinions on the general area here,
please do contribute them, and hopefully a clearer way forward will
emerge.
Thanks everyone!
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net

Is it possible to add fatal issue 1633365 to the list of blocker bugs
for F30?
Almost everyone running F28 and F29 Gnome desktop worldwide has
reported some variant of this very high severity evolution bug that
easily causes a full desktop crash. I believe that its time to get
this bug to block the next release.
ref:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1633365

Hi folks!
So there's a current Beta blocker bug:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1683197
it is currently accepted as a blocker on the understanding that trying
to boot to Workstation in 'basic graphics mode' (i.e. with 'nomodeset'
on the cmdline) *always* fails, on all hardware (or at least on most
hardware). However, we don't yet have enough testing to be sure of
this.
It'd be very helpful if folks with a test box can boot a Fedora 30
Workstation live image on it, using the 'Start Fedora-Workstation-Live
30 in basic graphics mode' option from the 'Troubleshooting' menu, and
see if it successfully reaches the desktop. Here's an image you can
use:
https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/compose/branched/Fedora-30-20190301.n....
(For bonus points, you can also try this with the F29 final live image,
and see if it works with *that* :>)
Please report your findings as a reply to this email, thanks a lot!
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1678453
Regarding comment 4: this sounds like pretty basic functionality
(screenshots in particular) will not work with ffwayland until Fedora
31 anyway. Also, ffwayland feature depends on Firefox 66 now, which
isn't releasing until 19.March, and the Beta Release (Preferred
Target) Go/No-go is on 21.March.
Question is whether either of these is enough of a cause for concern
to just push the feature to Fedora 31?
--
Chris Murphy